Hadley stood there for a long, desperate second or two, waiting for the far larger roar of exploding aviation fuel to follow. The roar did not come, and after a moment he allowed himself to breathe again.
God in heaven, but that, that had been close.
Tomboy hauled her F-14 into another hard turn, trying to follow the fleeing Mig as it twisted hard toward the north. She was three miles behind it now, and it was little more than a speck… though Hacker had a solid lock on the aircraft with their AWG-9.
Unfortunately, she had only the one Sidewinder left, and the target was jinking so sharply across the folded landscape that she was having trouble getting a lock.
Tone! “Fox two!”
Her last missile streaked toward the target.
Turning in his seat, Ivanov saw the missile arrowing toward him.
Cursing, he dragged his aircraft hard to the left and punched in the afterburners ? normally not a good idea when being pursued by a heatseeker, but he needed altitude, fast, and the only way to get it was ? as the Americans said ? to “go ballistic.”
As he climbed almost vertically, he cut his burners and released a string of flares, letting his Mig fall over onto its back with the nose pointed almost directly at the approaching Tomcat. The Sidewinder, deprived of its easy, hot targets, nosed over as it simple-mindedly pursued a flare, missing Ivanov’s aircraft by a generous margin.
He grinned into his mask. This American, whoever he was, was good.
Schooled in the warrior’s mentality, Ivanov welcomed this head-to-head exchange, the chance to test himself against another expert aviator. He was glad he wasn’t facing one of the rumored female pilots employed by the American battle group.
That would have been too easy, no challenge at all.
“He’s coming at us, head-to-head!” Hacker warned.
“I think he wants to play chicken,” Tomboy replied. “Hold on!”
She pulled the stick back, climbing fast; the enemy plane went into a climb at almost the same moment, and the two hurtled skyward, twisting as they passed, rolling into the deadly aerial maneuver known as a rolling vertical scissors. For an agonizing second, Mig and Tomcat flew back-to-back, practically canopy-to-canopy, and Tomboy could pull her head back and look “up” into the Russian’s cockpit, only a few deadly yards away.
Ivanov looked “up” and found himself scant yards from the American Tomcat; he could see the pilot and his radar intercept officer, their helmeted, visored heads tipped back to return his stare. He was so close he could actually read the lettering picked out on the F-14’s fuselage, just beneath the canopy: CDR JOYCE FLYNN “TOMBOY.” Behind was LT BRUCE KOSINSKI “HACKER.”
He frowned, puzzled. He could read English lettering fairly well. He knew the name “Bruce,” but “Joyce”? What kind of a man’s name was “Joyce”?
It sounded almost like a woman’s name…
For several deadly seconds, Mig and Tomcat rolled around one another as they continued their climb, still canopy-to-canopy. Tomboy cut her power and let her aircraft slew sideways, coming within a hair of stalling and going into a pancake dive.
That second or two was all she needed, though, as the Mig continued its climb, rolling onto its back and twisting clear of its aerial embrace with the Tomcat.
She’d anticipated his break; ninety percent of being a good tactical combat flyer was being able to guess what the other guy was going to do and matching or countering the move almost before he made it. Her port engine stuttered, dangerously close to a stall, but she nursed the throttle, felt the engine resume its accustomed thunder, and watched the Flogger drop across her gun sight.
Tomboy had already shifted to guns, since her M-61A1 was the only weapon she had left. Reacting instantly, and at a range of less than fifty yards, she squeezed the firing button on her control stick; the six-barreled cannon howled, sending a tight-spaced volley of 20mm rounds into the Flogger’s left wing, sawing through from front to back in a splintering, slashing burst. The skin of the wing pocked, then shredded; fuel from the wing tank gushed into the air, then ignited in the hail of white-hot shells. A fireball erupted scant yards from the nose of Tomboy’s F- 14 as the Flogger disintegrated. Jagged fragments hurtled past her head; shrapnel pinged and rattled from her aircraft’s skin ? and then she was hurtling through the fireball with a hard jolt and smashing through into open sky.
“Whee-ooh!” Tomboy exulted, her voice shrill. “Got him!” Then, sobering as she eased into a gentle turn, she said, “Did you see a chute?”
“Negative,” Hacker told her. “I didn’t see anything but fire.”
“Too bad,” Tomboy replied. “He was good.”
By now, Tombstone knew that he simply was not cut out for life as an infantryman. In the sky, strapped into the cockpit of an F-14, he had an impressive array of sophisticated electronics and high-powered weaponry at his command, available literally at the touch of a button. His machine spoke to him, in the warble of warning tones and flashing threat indicators, in the yellow-green glow of radar blips scattered across his VDI, in the feel of the aircraft as he pulled it into a turn or nursed it out of a plunging, hell-bent-for-leather dive through thirty thousand feet.
Here, in the mud and cold and blood of man-to-man combat, there was nothing to speak to him but his own pounding heart and his own ragged fear. Combat, for the aviator, still possessed something of the romantic, medieval flavor of single combat between knights. Here, though, there was no glory, no romance of single combat. There was only stink, pain, fear, and death.
Tombstone and several other naval personnel were huddled inside the partly wrecked stone building just below the crest of the ridge overlooking Arsincevo, not far from the spot where Tombstone had first seen the storage facility. A dead Russian lay face-up in the mud a few feet away. He was naval infantry, wearing a one-piece light-camo jumpsuit, his black beret lying by his side. His eyes, wide open and very, very blue, stared sightlessly at the sky.
Stoney had appropriated the man’s AKM assault rifle and a canvas pouch with five spare magazines, fully loaded, but his mind was full of images of the Russian he and Tomboy had killed in Kola. There’d been nothing romantic about that encounter, either, and he was not eager to get into a firefight.
Pamela and several members of her ACN crew were sitting on the ground nearby. No one had been hurt, and all were accounted for, but they seemed a bit lost now that they didn’t have their van of high-tech electronics.
He walked over and slumped down at Pamela’s side. “Sorry you came?”
“Are you looking for some kind of victory?” she asked him. “All right.
I’m sorry I came. I’m sorry I ever heard of this godforsaken place. Satisfied?”
“I wasn’t looking for satisfaction,” he told her.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. I know I wish you’d flown out on that helo.” He hesitated, wondering if he should say it. “I still
